Well, as
Napoleon said: "In war, moral factors account for
three quarters of the whole; relative material strength
accounts for only one quarter."

What the Axis didn`t have was any
Americans
below the elites who actually cared enough about the
amnesty bill to write their Senators.

Let`s review each component of this
mile-wide-but-inch deep coalition of special interests
to see why its overall strength was so vastly overrated.

The MainStream Media

The good news for the Axis of
Amnesty was that the MainStream Media
consistently demonize patriotic immigration
reformers. But that was about all the good news they
enjoyed. Just about the only steadfast partisans were
obviously self-interested or delusional fringe interests
like the
immigration lawyers, La Raza, and
economists.

Illegal aliens also, evidently,
don`t long to be
"brought out of the shadows".
They don`t see all that much in it for them. That`s
because they have a better understanding of economics
than do many of their elite supporters. They realize
that their wages are determined not by their "legal
status," but by
supply and demand.

Legal immigrants

The majority of legal immigrants
who have become citizens and can now vote are not
Mexican or Central American.[PDF]
So why did anyone
expect them to care about Latin American illegal
immigrants who jumped ahead of their
loved ones in line?

As Randall Burns has documented on
VDARE.com, white liberals who are ordinary citizens
showed negligible zeal for amnesty. The "progressive
netroots" who hang out on Daily Kos and
the like have turned themselves into a formidable
political force, but they were yet another dog that
didn`t bark for amnesty. On the rare occasions when the
Senate legislation came up on liberal blogs, the
comments sections
tended toward hostility.

Just about the only pro-amnesty
talking point that white liberals could rally around was
that passing the bill would make white conservatives—who
are, by definition, evil racists,
morally far inferior to
white liberals—mad.

That kind of status-striving
certainly motivated a lot of the
biased pro-amnesty press coverage in the MSM. But it
didn`t seem to drive much positive political activism
among the netroots.

The truth is that white liberals
are bored by Mexican illegal immigrants, who lack
the
glamour of the 1960s black civil rights protestors.
At the 2006 march for illegal aliens that I witnessed, I
didn`t see a single white American. Everyone marching
down Van Nuys Blvd.
appeared to be
mestizo or full-blooded Indian. (Indeed, judging
from how short the marchers were on average, there
weren`t many American-born Latinos in attendance
either.)

Catholics

The
Roman Catholic hierarchy`s most
prominent pro-amnesty spokesman was Los Angeles
Cardinal Roger Mahony. But he was simultaneously
negotiating a legal settlement of the child molestation
charges against the LA Archdiocese that would keep him
from having to testify in court about why he had kept
shuffling the criminal priests from one parish to
another—at a
cost of $660 million out of the contributions of the
faithful (including me).

Not surprisingly, Mahony`s calls
for amnesty were widely ignored.

Labor

The AFL-CIO had been a strong voice
for immigration restriction going back to
Samuel Gompers in the early 20th Century. But in
2000, the union`s bosses switched sides and
backed amnesty. In 2007, however, the rank-and-file
was so opposed that the bigshots apparently felt they
had to go along and condemn the bill.

Business

The CEO`s
finally realized that their current employees hated
amnesty, so they toned down their support.